Moderation of the Antisocial Cognition-Offending Relationship by Neighborhood Disorder: A Multilevel Analysis of Adolescents from Eight Western European Countries

Abstract

In an effort to gauge the effect of perceived neighborhood disorder on the antisocial cognition–delinquency relationship, this study subjected data from the Second International Self-Reported Delinquency study (ISRD2) to multilevel analysis. The sample for this study was composed of 20,700 participants (10,219 males and 10,474 females) from 502 public schools in eight Western European countries. The public school the child was attending served as the clustering variable and participants rated their neighborhoods on measures of physical and psychological disorder. Averaging these ratings across all participants attending a particular school, the mean ratings became the Level 2 variable (neighborhood disorder) in a multilevel analysis. A model composed of control variables, offending variety, moral neutralization, and cognitive impulsivity at Level 1 and neighborhood disorder at Level 2 produced a significant cross-level interaction in which the slope of the moral neutralization–delinquency regression line was significantly steeper when neighborhood disorder was high rather than when it was low. There was no effect for cognitive impulsivity, however, when it was assessed in conjunction with moral neutralization. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that significantly more offending occurs when an individual-level variable, moral neutralization, and a group-level variable, neighborhood disorder, are both elevated.